Monday, October 5, 2009

My Favorite Health, Wealth, Love Books

There are three areas of your life that need to be handled: Health, Wealth, Love. If you follow evolutionary psychology, what we're programmed with is just a mechanism for survival and replication. My favorite books that have helped me in these three areas:

Health:

  1. Abs Diet
  2. Abs Diet: Eat Right Every Time Guide
  3. Book of Muscle
  4. Full Body Workout
Wealth:
  1. The Neatest Little Guide to Stocks
  2. Dave Ramsey's The Total Money Makeover
Love:
  1. The Secret Psychology of How We Fall in Love
  2.   
Of course this isn't complete as I'm still doing some reading, but this is a great start. 

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Barbie and The Savanna Principle Explains Men's Psychology Pertaining to Mate Choice

The Savanna Principle is a term from evolutionary psychologist that says: the human brain cannot cope well with things and situations that did not exist in our "ancestral environment." The exact quote:

"The human brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment" (p. 21). -Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, by Miller & Kanazawa
This article by Kanazawa suggests that men cannot comprehend technology that a woman uses to enhance her physical appearance and make her appear more young and thus more fertile to seed mate with. Large, ample breasts on a 45-year old should indicate plastic surgery (which it does), but with the Savanna Principle since such technology didn't exist back then, we as men find it difficult to allow that fact to deter us from finding such breasts attractive. If we believe what is young is fertile and worth mating we'll overlook the real facts (that the women is 45, and past fertility age).

My next and last thought was when the author used Barbie as the ultimate perfect woman, a figure that should induce primal sexual desire in any man. I have a particular issue with his use of blond hair being most attractive. I personally love brunettes which may pertain to my ancestry. If in the ancestral world, my ancestors never saw blond hair on any woman so they wouldn't have found it attractive (after all, how can you find something attractive, if you never saw it...*) My simple point is that culture developed in specific geographic area developed differently, a point too often overlooked by Modern Psychologist.

Final Line: The ugly truth is that men find youthful looking women more attractive, because we always have.


* Interesting conclusion from a man who I'll assume is Asian (based off his picture and his last name) and in particularly from a region furthest from any ancestral land that could have blond haired women.